Anna Wintour Out of Vogue Soon?

[mackos]

The article in post #116 sums everything up pretty well, that's exactly what I'm thinking. However, as much as I love Carine, I just don't want her to move to Vogue US. I'm affraid she would be limited to fit the american market and I can't imagine Vogue Paris without her

 

[waxy]

Seems like Queen B is here to stay!

"I have no plans to leave American Vogue now or in the foreseeable future," said Vogue editor Anna Wintour as she was walking out of the Plaza this morning.

Read the rest of the story here:

http://www.observer.com/2008/media/a...-get-too-angry

 

[ponytrot]

good. i'm glad she put the rumours to rest.

for some reason Anna Wintour talk neccessitates snarkiness and unjustified sweeping generalisations.

 

[Juliax]

Oh I have just found out about all that ( better later then never lol)....Thanks everyone for information, articles n such. But now after Anna gave that ^^ interwiew its not true after all, not gonna happen Aww, I like Anna but would love even more to see fresh faces who can change Vogue US for smth better , bring back model covers and more fashion and all... Lets wait till the day 'she gets angry' then lol...

 

[mackos]

Lets wait till the day 'she gets angry' then lol...

With each new issue I feel like making her angry myself

 

[Master Wood]

Perhaps a little farfetched, but do people not feel the devil wears Prada was slightly truer, than the press would have us believe? If you're all like me you would have read countless articles on this formidable woman, and apart from her sense of style, determination, and business mind, one of the most profound issues that reoccur in any article you read about Wintour, is the way she has nurtured young talent to super stardom. Galliano, Jacobs, McQueen, even some younger designers like Pugh, Proenza Schouler etc have been taken under her wing and have been afforded incredible exposure and opportunities. Do we really think she would have done all this just for fashion and creativity's sake? I would have no doubt that if it came down to it, she would turn around to S.I Newhouse and present "a list" much like that depicted in the film. The loyalty she must have gained in the industry is far stronger, than any magazine sales, or advertising space. I absolutely believe that job could not be done by anyone other than miss Wintour unless she of course handpicked her successor and afforded that person, the contacts and knowledge she has gained in her 20 years as editor. If and when the time comes for her to step down, it's more than likely to be someone selected by Wintour to fill the role, I'm placing my bets on someone like Plum Sykes whom I believe Wintour is very fond of. Roitfeld as the head of American Vogue would probably be one of the biggest mistakes the fashion industry has ever seen.

 

[Harumi]

^^thank god. lets see if now that the press hs said it people realize that being editor in chief of a magazine like vogue US takes more than pulling off a gorgeous pair of shoes.

I find the idea of Carine at Vogue US an anathema (mostly because she is far too good for that stale gig) but there is no need to belittle Carine's achiements to make Anna look good. Carine has show business acumen of her own, considerably increasing Vogue Paris advertisement revenue and impact. She isn't a bimbo.
Just like Carine would probably fail in the US, Anna would sink at Paris Vogue, because it takes more than putting Aniston on the cover and socialites in the mags to run that publication.
I can't see any dramatic change at Conde Nast right now because from corporate standpoint, both editors are successes. Anna is certainly filling her brief (i.e., bringing in the dough), and Carine is filling hers (bringing the credibility, and not at a lost which is a plus).

 

[iluvjeisa]

Whatever happens, it would be a smart move to capitalize on what Vogue once stood for and essentially still stands for in a time when people are getting very tired of silly movie stars and sub par movies. I presume they're less inclined to read about the lives of stars who fail to enchant them in the first place.

 

[reese06]

At first I really thought that Carine would be good at US Vogue but now when I really think about it. The only people that would really care for Vogue would probably be "fashion" types and that would be a smaller circulation that what Vogue has right now.

 

[Alien Sex Friend]

US Vogue is too prudish for Carine.
she just can`t realise all her poential in US Vogue, but she worked for it earier- as stylist with Testino in the end of 90ies-beginning of zeroes- so you can imagine her hypothetically as editor for US Vogue, but Paris Vogue is very often about sex, cause Carine knows, what sex still sells. And US Vogue ignore it from last forces...
so... i cross my fngers for Carine staying in French Vogue- my fav magazine....

 

[Fabulyss]

US Vogue is too prudish for Carine.
she just can`t realise all her poential in US Vogue, but she worked for it earier- as stylist with Testino in the end of 90ies-beginning of zeroes- so you can imagine her hypothetically as editor for US Vogue, but Paris Vogue is very often about sex, cause Carine knows, what sex still sells. And US Vogue ignore it from last forces...
so... i cross my fngers for Carine staying in French Vogue- my fav magazine....

US Vogue is too prudish period. It's true though that Carine's aesthetic should stay at Paris Vogue, despite my wishful thinking the aesthetic of US Vogue's general followers is simply more conservative. That said, I think it caters far too much to an older generation and Wintour needs to go!

 

[GWOD]

^^ I agree, it often seems too conservative. Most likely because it has to appeal to the whole of the US, including the Mid-West/middle America, where the lifestyle and general mindset is so dramatically different from the far more metropolitan coasts.
I've heard people say this is one of the reasons why Anna's efforts as the Editor-In-Chief of Vogue are so commendable; because she can create a magazine which makes fashion accessible for such a wide and varied demographic, and have it be one of the most successful publications in the country.
I quite like Carine, but when you think about those kinds of elements of the job, she seems far less equipped to handle it in comparison to Anna.

 

[fourboltmain]

Dammit. I read the thread title and was looking to start singing 'Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.' Maybe I'll just stick to listening to Dark Side of the Moon while watching the Wizard of Oz?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spTPHlBg76c

^ I'll have you soon enough, and your broom too!

 

[iole]

Love her!

 

[iluvjeisa]

Please bring the image credit for that pic, iole.

It's an interesting mix of Sex Pistols aesthetic and Andy Warhol. Reminds me of that famous passage in the Andy Warhol diaries when Warhol pities Anna for her unsuccessful attempt to bring in a fashion feature for interview. Apparently she was reduced to tears, this in early 1980. Times change.

 

[tortoisie]

I think this "What's wrong with Vogue?" article by Cathy Horyn/IHT is pretty good on the subject.

NO one at Vogue, least of all its editor in chief, Anna Wintour, could have been seriously stung by a recent letter from a reader complaining that the magazine was in a rut. After all, Wintour chose to publish the letter, which chided the magazine for featuring the same women — "Gwyneth Paltrow, Caroline Trentini, Gisele Bündchen, Nicole Kidman, Sienna Miller, blah, blah, blah," as the reader, Kathryn Williams of San Diego, said. "I could make a calendar of your cover girls, and it would probably repeat year after year." She added: "Let's face it: Vogue is getting a bit stale. It is a pity, too — because the magazine is still much better than the others."

What is remarkable — given the rumors last month that Wintour was going to be replaced by the French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld — is that she was able to include not merely a critical view but one that accurately identifies the problem with the magazine. Vogue has become stale and predictable, and it has happened in spite of some of the best editors, writers and photographers in the business. And it has happened in spite of a leader who "only cares what readers care about," according to a long-time staff member.

Because of her intimidating presence, heightened by an almost unvarying personal style — the bob, the sunglasses, the extra armor of her Cheeverish clothes — Wintour, 59, is considered the ultimate fashion editor. In fact, her instincts are really those of a journalist. She has periodically updated Vogue over the last 20 years to reflect changes in the world and in women's lives. She has introduced new photographers, beginning in the late 1980s with Peter Lindbergh and Steven Meisel. At the same time she has a deep respect for the work of Irving Penn, as if she knows that Penn, however contemporary his pictures, is part of the mysterious link to Vogue's — and fashion's — past.

"That's the main reason I keep looking in the magazine, to see a photograph by Penn," said Magnus Berger, an editor in his 30s who, with Tenzin Wild, recently started a publication called The Last Magazine, an oversize journal that is a blend of art book and newspaper and which its founders hope will be a platform for young talent.

This sense of history, which enriches Vogue, is much less evident today in other fashion glossies. It has been nearly wiped away at Harper's Bazaar.

An avid follower of politics, as well as sports, she has broadened Vogue's coverage in both arenas and put a first lady on the cover. It was one of the first national publications to write about Sarah Palin. For all the fantasy in Vogue, especially the fairy-tale kind produced by Grace Coddington, the creative director, and Annie Leibovitz, the magazine is actually quite serious. There are things to read, long pieces, from writers with distinct voices: Julia Reed on politics, Jeffrey Steingarten on food, Sarah Mower on the Paris collections.

And unlike many of her rivals, Wintour, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has largely resisted the pressure to break down content to lists and small bites. Though this faster, drive-thru approach to editorial consumption may be what more people want.

According to a writer at Condé Nast, who requested anonymity because he works at a sister publication, "Anna's two great talents are that she understands her readers and she speaks with this incredible authority to advertisers." Indeed, as the writer points out, Condé Nast, having monopolized high-end magazines, has a rather odd relationship with luxury advertisers — which is that these advertisers cannot afford to go somewhere else, bad economy or not. Luxury brands haven't yet found a formula for success in digital media. Their relationship, then, with Condé Nast creates an "interesting ecology," as the writer put it. "They keep each other in business."

Meanwhile, though, many people have all but abandoned traditional media for Web sites and blogs. This is the locus of Wintour's harshest critics and where rumors first surfaced that she was going to be replaced by the 50ish Roitfeld, who has made French Vogue exciting in part by drawing on the sexiness of her own act. She knows how to play with fashion's self-referential habits.

The rumors were silly — Roitfeld runs a magazine with a circulation of 133,000, in contrast to American Vogue's 1.2 million. But silly or not, they were extravagantly denied by Condé Nast, which took out a two-page ad in The New York Times to show Wintour's record. It cited figures showing that Vogue had the highest number of advertising pages of any fashion magazine. Yet, in 2008, Vogue's ad pages were down 9.6 percent, Mediaweek said, compared with an average 8 percent decline for other fashion magazines. Rivals like Elle and Harper's Bazaar, which have adopted a pell-mell style that encourages value-for-money nibbling, have fared better. The very qualities that set Vogue apart — consummate fashion judgment, a comfortableness with ideas in the shallow pool of celebrity and weight-loss articles — now seem to be narrowing its view, like an aperture shutting down.

There are too many stories about socialites — or, at any rate, too few such stories that sufficiently demonstrate why we should care about these creatures. What once felt like a jolly skip through Bergdorf now feels like an intravenous feed. To read Vogue in recent years is to wonder about the peculiar fascination for the "villa in Tuscany" story. Ditto staff-member accounts of spa treatments and haircuts.

It's embarrassing to see how Vogue deals with the recession. For the December issue, it sent a writer off to discover the "charms" of Wal-Mart and Target. A similar obtuseness permeates a fashion spread in the January issue, where a model and a child are portrayed on a weekend outing with a Superman figure. Is a '50s suburban frock emblematic of the mortgage meltdown?

To ask what works in Vogue is in a sense to ask the same of all fashion magazines. Many do not seem to know how to relate to women in their 20s, except to throw celebrity pictures and clothes at them. Although the median age of its readers has hovered around 34 since Wintour became editor, in 1988, you don't feel that the magazine has considered how changes like social networks and Web-based subcultures have influenced women's ideas about themselves. This lack of awareness is reflected in Vogue's pages.

Also, people are likely to be short of money in the coming years. Vogue, along with the fashion industry, must find a way to deal with this reality, said Grace Mirabella, who ran Vogue for 17 years until she was replaced by Wintour. "You've got a fashion market that doesn't know how to do good, inexpensive clothes," she said. "That is something which should stop whether there is a recession or not."

The critic Vince Aletti, who is a curator of "Weird Beauty," an exhibition of recent fashion images that will open this month at the International Center of Photography, thinks that Vogue under Wintour is still the leader in a lot of ways. "For me any magazine that publishes Penn is great, and she has been publishing some amazing work by Annie Leibovitz," he said. Referring to Condé Nast, he added: "I think they would be crazy to get rid of Wintour, although I think the magazine needs something different. I don't think it's a bad-looking magazine, but it hasn't changed in quite some time in a significant way."

To people inside Condé Nast, like Michael Roberts, the fashion director of Vanity Fair and a friend of Wintour's, it's hard to imagine that Roitfeld would be in line to replace her unless, as he said, someone "has spiked the Kool-Aid." If such an event were to happen, he said: "There's a whole financial machine that would come crashing down, I would say. I'd like to see Carine talking to the people from North Beach Leather or St. John knits. It's all very professional and businesslike at American Vogue." As Roitfeld herself once said, with typical candor, "I'm not a business girl."

But there is something more in Wintour's background that makes it hard to replace her, though, inevitably, it will happen. "In newspaper terms, she is old news — the Nuclear Wintour story," Roberts said wearily. Editors of Wintour's generation, like the designers they champion and the photographers they protect, have a depth of knowledge not easily reproduced. Roberts said: "I've never seen anything from Carine that astonishes me the way that I have in American Vogue. I've seen kinky, sexy but not astonishing. But I did see astonishing in Vogue when Anna published a picture of Nadia Auermann having sex with a swan." He was referring to the Helmut Newton picture from the early '90s. That kind of subversion made American Vogue really cutting edge, Roberts said. "He's never been replaced."

[IHT]

 

[fourboltmain]

False alarm again...

Every time I see this thread on the front page, I run to the cupboards for the champagne.

*fourboltmain puts his glasses back and broods*

 

[t-rex]

Rumor of the Week: Anna for Ambassador!

There's only one way to top Vogue...
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
(NEW YORK) If the extremely insider rumors are to be believed, could Anna Wintour, the first lady of American fashion, be in the running for an official post in the Obama administration--like, say, an ambassadorship to England or France? Granted, her résumé lists all the qualifications--flawless organizational skills, an enviable Rolodex, hostessing experience to spare. (Think a State dinner is tricky to finagle? Then consider the Costume Institute gala.) Not to mention that the Vogue editor's faithful friends like Karl Lagerfeld will surely become fixtures at state dinners--lending a new layer of glitz and exclusivity to official affairs. Perhaps she'll meet with Carla Bruni-Sarkozy during couture?

http://www.fashionweekdaily.com/news/fullstory.sps?inewsid=6624792

 

[the telescreen.]

Love her!

Ah, I love it! Yes, I agree with iluvjeisa: a very polished Sex Pistols feel, no? God Save the Queen indeed.

There are a huge number of articles and they all say different things! Honestly, while Vogue may have lost some of its (I can't find the right word for it) fieriness ... we can't blame it all on Anna. Or just one particular source.

The first article I've read about this talked about the Editor of Russian Vogue. I agree with some of the previous posters that an American would be best for US Vogue. Anna, British, was closer to the US Vogue than a Russian would be.

 

[angel222]

Cecilia Dean!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!